How to Make a Living Selling Virtual Hats

At the end of a Dota 2 match the scoreboard pops up over the exploding ancient, and you’re given a chance to drift your eyes over the stats of each player; how much experience they were earning every minute, how many kills they got, which items they opted for. It’s interesting enough, but it’s not why people stick around instead of just disconnecting. What holds their attention is a scattered handful of gifts handed out at random among the ten players of each match. Sometimes you’ll get nothing, other times an exceedingly rare mythical item: perhaps a new courier to ferry items between you and the base, or an excellent hairstyle for Invoker, the master of wizardry.

Now almost three years into its beta, Dota 2 has a department store’s worth of items available to buy, and just as many dropping for free in games. Cosmetics are hardly news in games, or even in Valve games; Team Fortress 2 has been keeping itself fresh with hundreds of cosmetic and mechanical additions, although whether they’ve improved the game is a matter up for some debate.

The difference with Dota 2 is that these items don’t do anything. Even though the game is in an invite-only beta, it will eventually (and probably some time this year) be launched as a free to play title, supported entirely by in game purchases of items that are purely aesthetic. That’s a lot of risk for Valve to place on the power of fashion alone. But that’s hardly the only risk; Valve isn't even making the items that it is relying upon to fund the game. Instead, they're being made by the player community - some of whom are making a living from it.

“No one can deny the urge to make their characters look cool and individual.” Stephanie Everett, known to the Dota 2 community as Anuxi, is the closest thing Dota 2 has to a Lagerfield. “Personalisation makes you more attached to your characters and to the game.” Launched out of a competition that Valve ran in conjunction with Polycount, Anuxi created a set of cosmetics that were in the final eleven picked. Anuxi has worked on all sorts of projects and previously worked at Trion as a 3D modeller, but now she makes her whole living from Dota 2 items. Just recently she had a chest added to the game containing items made only by her: the Treasure of the Shaper Divine is now dropping in games all over the world, and people are buying keys (at $2.49/£1.59 each) just to get one of the twelve items she made.

“On Polycount we had those art guidelines posted up, and everyone was gushing over them because they were such a great insight into how Valve did things,” says Anuxi. Polycount, as a community, is made up of some of the biggest 3D artists and modellers in the gaming industry, along with a huge amount of people who are just enthusiastic about the creation of 3D objects. There was even precedent for the collaboration with Valve; just a few years before they’d run a similar competition for Team Fortress 2.

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It’s gotten to the stage where Anuxi is something of a DOTA celebrity.

“We knew that the winners of that competition got like $45k, so we knew there was money in it,” says Stephanie. This was back at the tail-end of 2012, before Anuxi, or many creators at all, had sunk their teeth into Dota 2. “I didn’t even like Dota before I started the competition, but I thought I should at least play it if I was going to be creating items for it.” And since that success in the competition, barely a fortnight has gone by when Anuxi hasn’t added something new to the Dota 2 Workshop.

In fact, it’s gotten to the stage where she’s something of a celebrity within the community. Along with a handful of other creators, a reputation has been forming. None of these people are employed as such by Valve, but they’re the golden geese that the developer is hanging the future of the game upon. If you take a look at the Workshop now, it’s clear that the quality and quantity of items is well above and beyond something even a hugely talented and competent developer like Valve could put out.

In essence, Valve is crowdsourcing Dota 2’s income, and they’re doing it without compromising the game in any way. There’s even been controversy when a set for one hero was deemed to go against the visual tone of the game by the community, before being promptly removed. It’s a system built entirely on goodwill. There’s absolutely no disadvantage to a player who pays nothing to Dota 2 compared to one who buys everything in the store. The latter will even have a fair amount of items just through playing the game, from the drops at the end of each match.

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You're directly supporting an individual who worked on that one piece of armour or that fetching virtual hat.

So why pay? Playing free to play games often feels like there's an invisible hand in your pocket trying to loosen the catch on your wallet, but in Dota 2 you are faced with an abundance of content rather than a curmudgeonly handful, which takes every last bit of bad taste out of the transaction. More than that, you feel like you’re directly supporting people who deserve to be supported. No longer is it some faceless developer, even one as highly thought-of as Valve, but instead you're directly supporting an individual who worked on that one piece of armour or that fetching virtual hat. Valve just takes a cut.

All of this creates a sense of collaboration between the community and the developer. Dota 2 is an interesting case purely because for all the excellent work Valve has done on it, it’s not really Valve's game; it was developed over the past decade by Icefrog and a few others, in conjunction with a large team of beta testers. More than that, it was the community that grew up around it, and their passion for the game, that elevated it to the level where Valve was interested in taking it on and pushing it further.

Valve is continuing that trend of allowing the community to enrich the game that they’re the highly involved custodians of. Beyond the cosmetics, there’s a thriving community of casters and personalities forming around this shared hobby, and there are avenues through which they can make money too.

“Valve got in touch with me about making an announcer pack,” says Pyrion Flax, the creator of a whole suite of comedy videos about Dota 2, who is now on his way to becoming a sports commentator for the game. “It was great, they’re really really nice guys and great to work with, but Valve’s approach to everything is that you have to be really proactive on your own. You limit creativity if you tell people how to do it.”

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You limit creativity if you tell people how to do it.

This is the main reason that Valve has only given the sparsest of guidelines on how to create items, mostly concerning visual readability and maintaining a consistency with the lore. Everything else is up to the creators. Creating an audio pack to replace the standard announcer with a famous member of the Dota 2 community (much in the same way they did with the Bastion Announcer pack back in December) is something that they’re still working out how to do.

“I recorded 1200 lines and tore up my throat. I had to go and see a throat specialist to make sure I was OK,” Pyrion continues. “And then Valve get back to me with a list of the lines, and told me that half of them were unusable.” The problem was he’d created lines for things Valve didn’t have triggers for. “I had a line for when Lion fights Ursa about a bear squaring off with a lion, which was way too specific.” So he went back, and revised a whole bunch, before rerecording a load more.

“I’ve been working on this thing for nine months now, and people have babies in less time than that.” That’s not a criticism of Valve, just a commentary on how in the dark everyone is on how exactly to approach all these new concepts. It’s not just people like Anuxi and Pyrion who are having to figure everything out; Valve is stomping all over new ground without a compass too.

It’s hard not to be a little in awe of quite how elegantly Valve have pulled all this off, and if there's a flaw in the plan it's very difficult to spot. Creators get recognition and income, the community doesn’t feel like it’s being exhorted just to play the game they love, and Valve gets to focus on making the game better for everyone.

Phill Cameron is a freelance journalist who leaves his PC fan light on every night to scare away the monsters. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN.